Written on May 3, 2019, this essay criticizes the reporting stance of the Japanese media regarding PM2.5 and photochemical smog, especially that of the Asahi Shimbun and NHK, and argues that there is a connection between anti-nuclear activism and air pollution.
It denounces as a single structure the reporting that obscures pollution originating from China, the dependence on thermal power following the shutdown of nuclear plants, and the Asahi Shimbun’s vested interests surrounding the Osaka North Yard redevelopment.

2019-05-03
In order to conceal that it is air pollution resulting from the anti-nuclear campaign that the Asahi Shimbun has continued to carry out on a massive scale… total shutdown of nuclear power plants, absolute opposition to restarting them…

This is from a section I published on 2018-06-25 under the title, “Although in spring we are frequently covered by PM2.5 flying in from mainland China, the media hardly report it at all…”
It happened while I was watching a weather forecast saying that yesterday and today would be the hottest days of the year so far.
At the same time, it was warning people to be careful because it would also be a day covered by “photochemical smog.”
“Photochemical smog,” what a strangely nostalgic phrase that is… because when I chose Osaka as the stage of my life, I remember that Osaka was frequently covered in photochemical smog…
But why do they not say PM2.5…
Although in spring we are frequently covered by PM2.5 flying in from mainland China, the media hardly report it at all…
Yet they do report it under the name photochemical smog.
So I searched PM2.5 just now, and today everything from western Japan to the Kantō region is covered in red, exceeding the environmental standard…
In other words, the Japanese media, beginning with NHK…
for some reason… seem to be saying photochemical smog instead of PM2.5.
Just to be sure, if one checks today’s PM2.5 situation in China, it is more than five times the Japanese figures…
and is filled with places exceeding by more than double Japan’s highest warning level of over 85 μg/m3.
A little while ago, NHK satellite broadcasting…
was airing a feature on the way of life of women in China, now increasing there as the country has grown richer, who are called “independent women”…
(I have encountered in Kyoto such people as would indeed exist in a society that is capitalist through and through… one of those women said her hobby was traveling to Japan… since her vacation is about five days… she said Japan is close and convenient, and kept making repeat trips to Japan.)
In order to air such a documentary, they cannot go against the intentions of the Chinese government, so instead of saying PM2.5 they rename it photochemical smog…
and want to suggest that it is not flying in from China, but is caused by Japan alone.
Then if it is to be said that the cause is uniquely domestic to Japan…
that would be what I have mentioned many times before… the immediate shutdown of all nuclear power plants carried out during the Democratic Party administration by Naoto Kan, Masayoshi Son, Mizuho Fukushima, and others…
a wretched policy decision born of kindergarten-level hysteria… entangled with private greed…
because of which…
the nation of Japan not only had more than ten trillion yen in astronomical national wealth skimmed away by overseas capital in only a few years…
but also, in place of nuclear power, the finest clean energy…
continued importing vast amounts of oil and coal…
and kept thermal power plants running to maintain electricity, the lifeline of the economy,
so that the resulting outbreak of photochemical smog is, if one says it is domestically caused, an indisputable fact.
However, searching the internet… I…
discovered that the viciousness of the Asahi Shimbun reaches an extreme here as well.
Several years ago… the Asahi Shimbun had published an editorial like the following…
that the recent reappearance of photochemical smog is the result of plant activity…
Whether they merely went along with the people above… those whom it is no exaggeration at all to call traitors to the nation or outright sellouts…
or whether they themselves were the mastermind, I do not know…
but in order to conceal that it is air pollution resulting from the anti-nuclear campaign that the Asahi Shimbun has continued to carry out on a massive scale… total shutdown of nuclear power plants, absolute opposition to restarting them…
they bring in plant activity.
Such is the viciousness of the Asahi Shimbun.
The project plan for Osaka Umeda’s North Yard, the former JNR freight yard site, the greatest urban plan of the postwar era created over more than twenty years by gathering the wisdom of both the public and private sectors of Osaka…
happened to overlap with the completion of the two Nakanoshima skyscrapers that Asahi built staking the fate of the company on them…
and so the Asahi Shimbun threw North Yard into confusion… and even now, the second-stage sale has not appeared at all.
In step with Asahi’s intentions…
the man who took advantage of this… who at the time was the chairman of the Regulatory Reform and Liberalization Council…
was a one-man manager of a company whose corporate creed was to buy at half-price and then discount even further.
At North Yard, he not only failed to carry out any deregulation at all…
but also, in the airport issue that became the starting point of the Moritomo Gakuen problem… while making noise about aircraft noise and receiving subsidies…
when the government decided to abolish Itami Airport and unify operations at Kansai Airport, that would be inconvenient for him
(because the subsidy administration would no longer hold up)…
so he created an organization called something like the اتحاد of the surrounding twelve municipalities and got Itami Airport’s survival approved…
This state of affairs, so full of almost comical contradictions…
he… while being chairman of the Koizumi Junichirō Cabinet’s Regulatory Reform and Liberalization Council at the time… because he absolutely wanted to obtain North Yard…
drew in Hankyu Railway, the feudal lord-like company of Kansai…
and, under the name of the Kansai Twelve-Company Alliance… something completely opposite to deregulation…
completed, with the support of the Asahi Shimbun, a structure of vested-interest groups for acquiring the people’s property at half-price and then discounted further…
and obtained what truly was a “super-first-class commercial district” that would never appear again…
at the half-price-discounted figure of 45 million yen per tsubo.
Because it would be absolutely disastrous if this wrongdoing were exposed…
they… with respect to the second-stage sale of North Yard…
although it had been created over more than twenty years by gathering the wisdom of the public and private sectors of Osaka
(the private representative being the president of Osaka University, the public representative the mayor of Osaka City)…
and although according to the greatest urban plan of the postwar era…
in order to sell the people’s property even one yen higher…
they could never hold an open international public tender.
No matter what happened, they had to prevent the second-stage sale of North Yard…
according to the plan they had created…
from being subjected to an open tender open to the world.
The reason goes without saying.
Because it would be won at more than 100 million yen per tsubo.
Because the wrongdoing that was a joint production of him and the Asahi Shimbun…
would be exposed before all under heaven.
Trying to make this second-stage sale vanish… they…
it is also an unmistakable fact that the mastermind was the Asahi Shimbun…
and what they came out saying was… “Stop the second-stage sale, and make it a green park”…
In their hearts they care nothing for plants at all…
because they are people who are lumps of vicious private greed… and so even plants…
this truly should be called one of Asahi’s special tricks…
always using them conveniently for themselves…
and that very manner is the true nature of their viciousness and ugliness…
as human beings who are a lump of evil beyond anything else… they are people to be despised.